People sometimes translate pages on this site into other languages. Naturally, we encourage this, and you don't even have to ask permission (because making derivative works shouldn't require permission). But if you tell us about a translation you've done, we'll link to it from the original article, and host it if you want.

Recently, Hua Jin made two new translations into Chinese, which gives us a nice excuse to highlight all the translations here. If you know of more, or are interested in doing some yourself, please tell us.

So far we've got:

• 中文 (Chinese) version of Teaching Music Under Copyright.

• 中文 (Chinese) version of The Case for the Death of Copyright.

• Polski (Polish) version of The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.

• Italiano (Italian) version of The Promise of a Post-Copyright World.
  (Also hosted here).

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We've often written here about how the copyright industry loves to confuse attribution with control of copying. The two are quite different, of course: plagiarism is not the same as the unauthorized sharing of properly-attributed materials. For example, when college students download songs from the Internet, they do not replace the artists' names with their own. The vast majority of shared files are accurately credited, even when the copying itself is illegal.

But the industry knows that the public gets much more upset about misattribution ("Artists deserve credit for their work!") than about illegal copying ("What, I can't share with my friends?"). So industry representatives take the easy route and simply pretend that one is the other.

I hadn't expected to see a New York University associate provost fall for the trick, though. Marilyn McMillan, Associate Provost and CITO at NYU, has published A Note on Illegal Downloading. It starts out with a few paragraphs purely about illegal copying, then takes a turn into truly weird territory...

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We had the pleasure of bringing Rick Falkvinge, founder of Sweden's Pirate Party, on a U.S. West Coast tour in late July and early August, to talk about copyright reform and civil liberties. The Pirate Party is a political party based on radical copyright and patent reform, and it's started to have an electoral impact in Sweden.

While he was here, CNET News did an interview with him.

Recordings of his talks are now available:

• Keynote speech at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (15 minutes), Thursday, 27 July. Note the audience member coming up to the stage right afterwards to press a campaign contribution into Rick's hands!

• Stanford University (79 minutes), Tuesday, 31 July (or click here for audio only). This was a particularly good talk, because the audience had excellent questions.

• Tech Talk at Google (55 minutes), Tuesday, 31 July. A full presentation of the Pirate Party's platform and strategy

• Berkeley CyberSalon (audio only), Sunday, 29 July. A panel discussion entitled "Copyright Reconsidered", with Rick Falkvinge, Anthony Falzone, Mary Hodder, Fred von Lohmann, myself, and Jeff Ubois as moderator.

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The article Publishing Renaissance by Allison Randal, over at the O'Reilly Radar, is a fascinating read. She describes how her press was able to publish its first book — helpfully, she gives actual numbers:

Print-on-demand technology allows individual books to be printed as they're ordered, and shipped directly to the purchaser. The technology has developed to the point that the quality of a print-on-demand book is equal to the quality of a traditional printed book. This style of publishing is cheap. You generally pay a small set up fee, and then have no other expenses until the book actually sells, and then only pay for the printing. (The printing cost is about $1 per copy higher than a traditional printer at high volume, and cheaper than a traditional printer at low volume.) It cost me well under my goal of $1k to produce Gravitas from start to finish. With all this power at their fingertips, publishers could experiment much more freely with low risk.

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Imagine if when you obtained a book (or a song or a movie), you could know if the way you obtained it was approved by its author. Could you use that information to make better choices?

I think so. Imagine this scenario: you walk into your local copy shop and ask for a book you saw recommended on someone's blog. (Machines to print books on demand are already here; see the Bookmobile, for example.)

Under the current copyright system, the copy shop must have permission from the copyright holder to print the book for you. One way for them to get permission is to work out bulk deals with publishers, so that every time the copy shop prints a book, a certain percentage goes to the publisher (and then a percentage of that goes to the author). Another possibility is for copy shops to become publishers themselves, bypass the traditional publishers, and work out deals with authors directly.

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(Translations: 中文)

Today the Vancouver Sun published an editorial by Jacob Tummon entitled "The Case for the Death of Copyright". Tummon is already known to readers here for his in-depth piece on copyright at Legaltree.ca. While this editorial is necessarily shorter and less detailed than that earlier piece, it still makes a strong case. Tummon is a law school graduate, and he makes the excellent point that unenforceable laws inevitably lead to disrespect for the law itself: "Canada has experience with laws that engender widespread violation: Consider prohibition in the 1920s. A law violated so brazenly is more than meaningless — it undermines the effectiveness of the legal system generally." Bravo to the Vancouver Sun for giving space to these ideas.

Here's the full editorial, reprinted with Jacob Tummon's permission...

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As promised, here's the Op-Ed piece (lightly edited) that I sent in to the New York Times as a response to Mark Helprin's article on extending copyright...

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"Question copyright" doesn't necessarily mean "abolish copyright", it just means ask the right questions, so we can come up with a system that will serve society best.

So here's a proposal: proportional registration fees for copyrights. Here's how it works...

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There's a famous phenomenon in copyright known as the orphan works problem. It refers to the situation in which the copyright owner of a given work cannot be found. This effectively prevents others from using such a work as part of a new project. For example, if you want to make a movie based on a novel, you must first get permission from the novel's copyright holder. But if the novel is an orphan work, then you can't even find the copyright holder. Technically speaking, you could proceed without permission — but you would do so at your own risk. The copyright owner could emerge at any time and demand penalties. You might end up having to pay damages; worse, you might have to abandon or censor your derivative work, no matter how much effort you'd put into it.

Related to the problem of orphan works is another problem, much more serious, yet much less discussed. I call it the ghost works problem. Ghost works are all the works that never get made in the first place, or are made but not released, because copyright concerns prevent them either from being started or from being distributed. Every project that dares not base itself on an orphan work becomes a ghost work, but there are many more ghost works beyond that. Indeed, it would be fair to say that today most works are ghost works. That is, most works either don't exist or are not accessible, because copyright obstructs them. Whenever you walk into a bookstore, survey the shelves around you and imagine them to be 90% empty, for in a sense they are.

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Bob Ostertag is a musician and experimental audio artist based in San Francisco. He has been performing and recording since the 1970s. In this article, he describes the recording industry from the point of view of an experienced musician, and explains why most musicians today would be much better off sharing music via the Internet than signing standard industry recording contracts. He also discusses the larger issue of what happens to society as more and more of our culture gets locked down under centralized corporate control. Bob practices what he preaches: his music is available for download from his web site, bobostertag.com.

(This article is now also running over at AlterNet.)

In March 2006 I posted on the Web all of my recordings to which I have rights, making them available for free download. This included numerous LPs and CDs created over 28 years [1]. I explained my motivations in a statement on the Web site:

I have decided to make all my recordings to which I have the rights freely available as digital downloads from my web site. […] This will make my music far more accessible to people around the globe, but my principal interest is not in music distribution per se, but in the free exchange of information and ideas. "Free" exchange is of course a tricky concept; more precisely, I mean the exchange of ideas that is not regulated, taxed, and ultimately controlled by some of the world's most powerful corporations… [2]

One year later, I continue to be amazed at how few other musicians have chosen this route, though the reasons to do so are more compelling than ever. Why do musicians remain so invested in a system of legal rights which clearly does not benefit them?

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